Q: This spring you’re starring in a movie called The Joneses, in which you play the “father” of a cool but fake family that a corporation assembles to coax their neighbors into buying stuff. I suppose a lot of celebrities do the same thing.
A: Yeah, sure. I haven’t sold that much. But the culture that’s embracing Twilight and Paranormal Activity and District 9 and 2012—you could kind of say that The X-Files sold that.

Q: You helped release a media virus.
A: Exactly. And now it’s reinfected people. I guess it went dormant for a while.

Q: You passed through a period of genuine pop-culture frenzy during those peak X-Files years—sort of like what Robert Pattinson is going through now with the Twilight phenomenon. I’m curious about how it feels to live in the aftermath of that.
A: When you’re in the middle of it, you think, “This is the way it’s always going to be.”